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06-18-2004, 08:46 AM | #1 |
YT 6000 Club Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 6,238
| Garfield Creator Has a Yorkie! :) Funny that his dogs outnumber his cats! I hope his cat ain't as mean to Pookie as Garfield is to Odie! --- Some portly, pampered pussycats live well into their 20s. Garfield, the world’s favorite fat, feisty feline, has just achieved film-star status at the fine old age of 26, and he’s still hissing along at the velocity of a rocket-launched furr ball, with an attitude as abrasive as a scratching post and a faithful following that numbers around 263 million readers worldwide. “Garfield the Movie” scored No. 5 at the box office when it opened in theaters last weekend, leaving a big Cheshire grin on the faces of the ornery orange wisecracker and his crafty creator, cartoonist Jim Davis. It’s all about “me-oww” right now, and the pair couldn’t be happier. So what took the cartoon-strip cat so long to make the leap onto the big screen, after so many successful years in the funny papers and in animated TV appearances? Was he holding out for more lasagna - his favorite comfort dish? “Let’s go with that one,” cartoonist Davis said from his Paws Inc. headquarters in rural Indiana during a recent phone interview. “That’s funnier than my real answer. I never wanted to do traditional animation with Garfield, for one reason. One word: Disney. It’s impossible to do something with traditional animation and not be compared to Disney.” So Garfield became a more realistic-looking CGI (computer-generated-imaging) character, moving about in a world of real, live-action people and animals, created by the visual effects team of Rhythm & Hues (“Dr. Doolittle,” “Dr. Doolittle 2”), and cinematographer Dean Cundey (“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”). Davis says CGI reached a new level of realism with the film “Monsters Inc.,” and that was when he decided the technology was capable of creating the fluid, lifelike movements he wanted to see in Garfield’s big-screen debut. “He, in this movie, is a real cat,” the cartoonist said. “He walks on all fours, he has real fur, and it’s just amazing. We worked real hard on making him move realistically. Now you can look at his eyes and that smile of his and tell immediately it’s Garfield. It really does look like the cartoon cat, but in a real world. It’s a bit of a shock for about a minute, but then you accept him right away.” Next - finding the perfect Garfield voice to replace the late Lorenzo Music, also known as the voice of the doorman in the “Rhoda” TV series, who had provided Garfield’s laid-back, smart-aleck vocal personality on TV for so many years. Perfect solution: Bill Murray. “That was a coup,” Davis said. “We only ever talked about one actor, and that was Bill. Because of his attitude. And because he also has this ability that very, very few actors have. Lorenzo Music had it. He was the voice of Garfield for over 20 years. Sadly, he passed away 2½ years ago, and I never cast anyone else with that voice. But Bill has the ability to throw a line away and do it with great humor - to do it and make us laugh. “Most comedians have to hammer lines to make them funny, but Bill, he has that kind of lazy, you know, absent-mined way of delivering a line that Garfield always has in his animation. So the voice quality fit, and on top of that, you have his attitude.” Davis, born in Marion, Ind., in 1945, was raised as a farm boy where “barn cats” flourished in numbers of up to 25 most of the time. There were three or four dogs, too, but he remembers the “mousers” and “ratters” the best as he was growing up as a kid plagued for many years with asthma. The comic pages of the Marion, Ind., Chronicle-Tribune pulled him through those years of being confined to the house, and he took to drawing and writing, inspired by the likes of “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois,” both by Mort Walker, “Pogo” by Walt Kelly, and even the more dramatic strips such as Milton Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” and Oklahoma-born Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy.” But Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts,” featuring the free-spirited Snoopy and the wee wisdom of Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy, was one of his greatest influences. “He showed me just the power in gentle situations,” Davis said of Schulz, who would become his friend later in life. “Out of the mouths of babes. Just soft humor but yet really powerful statements.” By junior high school, Davis had overcome his asthma. He lettered in football and went on to major in art and business at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. After two years with a local advertising agency, he was hired by “Tumbleweeds” comic strip creator Tom Ryan as an assistant. It was in this job that he gained the courage to try for syndication of a comic strip of his own creation. His “Gnorm Gnat” lasted five years before Davis decided to end it by drawing a giant foot that fell out of the sky and crushed Gnorm in his last newspaper appearance. “Got one letter,” Davis said. “One letter to the editor, saying it was too bad. I guess that was a good choice. One letter.” He decided that a cat might be funnier than a gnat, and in 1978, Garfield, a cynical, lazy, lasagna-loving composite of every feline Davis had ever known, took his bow in 41 U.S. newspapers. Garfield has since scratched out a niche for himself as the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world, a distinction which landed him on his feet in the Guinness World Records book. And despite the ornery orange guy’s constant harassment of Odie, his wide-eyed, slobbering canine housemate, Davis gets no hate mail from dog lovers. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. “I’ve been waiting for it to come, because Garfield is terrible. I mean, he’s really awful to Odie, but the mail I get from dog lovers is, ‘That’s my dog. My dog’s just like Odie.’” Funny thing is, although Davis considers himself a “cat person,” he owns only one, a gray tiger cat named Spunky, while two dogs, Mollie the chocolate Labrador retriever, and Pookie the Yorkshire terrier, share his abode. “I would say that I like both cats and dogs for different reasons,” Davis said. “In the forward of Garfield’s 25th anniversary book, (columnist) Dave Barry, who is admittedly a dog lover, said, if you were standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with your dog and you jumped in, your dog would jump with you, thinking, ‘What a great idea, maybe there’s some food at the bottom.’ Whereas the cat would just sit there and stare at you and go, ‘What a moron.’” http://www.newsok.com/cgi-bin/show_a...tentertainment |
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06-20-2004, 12:40 PM | #2 |
Moderator Emeritus Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: California
Posts: 1,149
| That new Garfield movie looks terrible to me! Anyway, it's nice to know he has a Yorkie. Sometimes I call Otis "Odie" too! |
06-20-2004, 02:47 PM | #3 |
YT 6000 Club Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 6,238
| You just want to confuse poor Otis! He can find himself a good Johnnie Cochran and sue for mental anguish! |
06-20-2004, 03:27 PM | #4 |
Moderator Emeritus Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: California
Posts: 1,149
| .....and we've only listed the names we call him that don't require censoring!! |
06-20-2004, 04:23 PM | #5 |
YT 6000 Club Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 6,238
| Wuh woh! Otis is a naughty boy? I can't imagine that, just look at his cute "I'M INNOCENT" face right there in your avatar. |
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